For simplicity’s sake: no context, no China

Steinmüller, Hans ORCID: 0000-0002-5921-421X (2025) For simplicity’s sake: no context, no China. In: Wu, Di, Pulford, Ed and Pia, Andrea, (eds.) China as Context: Anthropology, post-globalisation and the neglect of China. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK. ISBN 9781526184313 (In Press)

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Abstract

Generations of China anthropologists have complained about the marginality of Chinese research in general debates in anthropology. One reason for this malaise may be that anthropologists of China did not get the balance of context and substance right. Either they adopted context created by other disciplines (for instance, to describe the setting of a village ethnography), or they focused merely on context (when providing commentaries on social change). Both approaches typically fail to capture social complexity. To approach social complexity, we need to bracket the problem of ‘context’, and instead follow actors in their own practices of attention, through the resonances that background and foreground action. Such an approach is not necessarily related to ‘China’ and never exhaustively given in ‘texts’, but it requires the analyst to attend to the forces of simplification in action and in analysis, against which it is possible to measure complexity.

Item Type:	Book Section
Divisions:	Anthropology
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology D History General and Old World > DS Asia
Date Deposited:	11 Jul 2025 23:19
Last Modified:	11 Jul 2025 23:19
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128791

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